County Offers Site For Veterans Museum

May 16, 1986

DELAND — A plot of county-owned land at Daytona Beach Regional Airport was offered Thursday as a site for what used to be the Armed Services Museum operated by county veterans groups.

Volusia County Council members said they will charge about $90 per month, less than museum organizers are paying to store the artifacts that will be displayed, for an 11,000-square-foot plot behind the proposed site of the county health department's maternity and children's clinic.

That offer ends a four-year search by veterans groups for a museum site. Council members and county administrators have been helping in the hunt for a year.

Members of several veterans groups have promised to build a 6,000-square- foot facility for the museum. The groups have been selling newspapers and aluminum cans to recycling plants to raise the $150 monthly rent for storage space.

Museum artifacts have been in storage since 1982, when the veterans were forced to vacate the Daytona Mall. The mall, which had donated space to the museum since 1972, rented that space to a shop.

The museum's collection includes relics of every American conflict from the Civil War to the Vietnam War.

When the new museum is built, it will share the access road and parking lot of the proposed health department clinic. Council members on Thursday decided to hire PBS Building Systems Inc., Orlando, to design and build the $780,000 clinic. Money for the project is to come from a state grant and construction is supposed to start by June 30.